A New York City media holding company known for revitalizing dormant brands is betting it can turn the archive of a once-popular American newsweekly into a gold mine of publishing, film and TV projects.
ZelnickMedia, whose holdings include Time Life, National Lampoon and Columbia Music Entertainment, has formed a partnership with Robert Whiteman, president of the Liberty Library Corp., to exploit the archive of the long-defunct Liberty magazine. Liberty, a once-popular journal of news and entertainment much like Colliers or the Saturday Evening Post, published 1,300 issues between 1924 and 1950 and, at its peak, boasted a circulation of more than three million readers each week.
Liberty featured the most prestigious and popular writers, artists and illustrators of its day, as well as works by leading politicians and public figures. The magazine's archive includes a wide variety of short fiction (and condensed novels—Liberty pioneered the practice before Reader's Digest) by such writers as James Cain, Ring Lardner, Richard Wright and P.G. Wodehouse, as well as essays by such figures as Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and Charles De Gaulle.
"This is not about nostalgia," said Strauss Zelnick, founding partner at ZelnickMedia. "This is about taking all of this incredible material and making something new." Zelnick is partnering with L.A.—based Intellectual Properties Worldwide to exploit the literary properties, some of which already have had classic films based on them, for further film and TV deals.
Arthur Klebanoff of the Scott Meredith Agency is representing the Zelnick/Liberty venture to the book industry. "We're looking for formats, price points and partners who see series and anthology publishing as an opportunity," said Klebanoff, who pointed to likely projects involving fiction, nonfiction, crossword puzzles, cartoon collections and period advertising. "If we get it right, we can supply series content for a long time." Klebanoff said that the Liberty archive contains about 17,000 copyrighted fiction and nonfiction materials by such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Groucho Marx and George Bernard Shaw.
Klebanoff told PW that like many journals of the era, Liberty acquired all rights through work-for-hire agreements. But, explained Klebanoff, "almost without exception," Liberty's records and copyright renewals "were impeccably maintained. It's all protected." The archive is on microfiche, but the venture is looking for a partner to digitize the physical issues, which reside in a warehouse in Rye, N.Y., for library and educational access.
"Even if only a small slice of the material is suitable for contemporary publishing," said Klebanoff, "there's still an awful lot of book material."
